Up – Deploy serverless apps in seconds

Last year I wrote Blueprints for Up, describing how most of the building blocks are available to create a great serverless experience on AWS with minimal effort. This post talks about the initial alpha release of Up.

The TL;DR was to run your “vanilla” HTTP server inside of Lambda on a unprivileged port, and relay requests to it, so that you don’t have to write code specifically targeting Lambda or other platforms.

Roughly a month ago I decided to start working on it over at apex/up, and wrote the first small serverless sample application tj/gh-polls for live SVG GitHub user polls. It worked well and costs less than $1/month to serve millions of polls, so I thought I’d go ahead with Up and see if I can offer open-source and commercial variants.

The long-term goal is to provide a “Bring your own Heroku” of sorts, supporting many platforms. While PaaS is nothing new, the serverless ecosystem is making this kind of program increasingly trivial, however AWS and others often suffer in terms of UX due to the flexibility they provide. Up aims to abstract platform internals away and provide a user-friendly solution.